PC-based industrial automation, human-machine interfaces (“HMIs”) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (“SCADA”) capabilities have been industry standard since the 1980s, allowing suppliers to build products to run on relatively stable target platforms, and allowing their customers to use familiar operating systems for industrial automation applications. Traditionally, remote access to these HMI/SCADA offerings has presented several challenges but more recently it is common for users to be able to quickly and easily create “dashboard screens” (e.g., summary screens, etc.) for remote viewing on multiple devices, for instance, PCs, tablets, smartphones, and the like. These screens generally are capable of being viewed using any web browser that supports HTML5 (or other/latest HTML versions), an industry-standard markup language used for structuring and presenting content via the Internet and the web.
With HTML5 (or other/latest HTML versions) technology, HMI/SCADA capabilities allow users to create and maintain remote viewing screens compatible with most tablets or smartphones, without a great deal of custom programming or software maintenance hassle on the SCADA-side due to updates to remote viewing capabilities of a device's hardware or firmware. Moreover, large sets of data coming in from the field can be filtered, collected and analyzed appropriately in order to extract the real-time knowledge (e.g., trends, patterns, and the like) that can be valuable to the end user/customer.
In the Smart Factory scenario, manufacturers of sensor devices, including Auto ID and vision systems, are increasingly taking advantage of the technology and potential offered by the Internet of Things (“IoT”) middleware solutions already available in the factory automation field. Designing, implementing and selling new, effective data mining tools (along with proper visualization capabilities (e.g., widgets)) is increasingly become necessary for companies that want to remain competitive in the IoT Digital Age. Additionally, in today's Factory Automation scenarios, when data mining engines are available, they are generally Cloud-based and not practically accessible directly from field devices (for instance, due to issues such as complexity, bandwidth, data security/confidentiality, expense, and the like).